University hookup culture: Convenient or a path to sexual assault?

The purpose of this study is to have a better understanding of the potential impact that hookup culture has on college students today. While this culture can be convenient and the most modern way of getting to know someone sexually, it also has the chance to be dangerous. By learning how this culture works and how college students engage in it, university employees and higher education professionals can support students through sexually related issues that they might come across

A Fountain Bewitched: Gender, Sin, and Propaganda in the Massa Marittima Mural

The fountain mural discovered in 2000 in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima has drawn international attention due to its rare iconographic allusions to fertility and witchcraft in late thirteenth century Italy. The mural, which depicts eight women underneath a deciduous tree with phalli hanging from its branches in lieu of fruit, raises numerous questions. In this thesis, I examine the positive classical iconographic associations to fertility and auspiciousness and how these symbols came to be reinterpreted within a Christian context as elements of sin and temptation. Furthermore, the connections between the lingering classical prototype of a woman as a being of unbridled sexuality, temptation, and bearer of prophetic knowledge continued to manifest themselves in medieval folklore beliefs of witchcraft and its artistic representations in the high and late Middle Ages. The mural is evidence of how these anxieties were effectively appropriated into the genre of propagandistic political art during a time of civil unrest in central Italy

Constructing Campanilismo: The Sacred Topography of Ravenna in the Middle Ages

This dissertation examines the 856 CE relocation of the relics of Ravenna's patron saint, Apollinaris, to the church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. Previously, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo was the palatine church reserved for the secular elite, but I argue its reinvention as a place of cultic worship in the ninth-century was a deliberate calculation by the archbishops of Ravenna, who were driven by ideological motives relating to the current political situation of the Mediterranean world--specifically the rise of a sovereign Papal State in Italy. Scholarship on the medieval topography of Ravenna, its art, and its monuments has traditionally produced monographic studies that focused on teleological questions of iconography, style, influence, and production history, but there has yet to be an attempt to synthesize material in order to understand how each of these monuments functioned together within the urban fabric of the city. My dissertation contributes to this extant literature through a reassessment of the church of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo and its relationship to its surrounding built environment by considering novel approaches to medieval urbanism, space, place, and sacrality. I argue that the re-invention of this site as a cultic center was an integral part in a larger campaign of social and political propagation by the archbishops of Ravenna to produce feelings of local civic pride--campanilismo--through a carefully orchestrated manipulation of art, architecture, liturgy, and ritual.Doctor of Philosoph

Readings From Selected Works

James Longenbach is a poet, critic, and the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses on American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His critical works include Modernist Poetics of History, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, Wallace Stevens: the Plain Sense of Things, and his most recent The Art of the Poetic Line, which explores the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Threshold, Fleet River, Draft of a Letter, and his most recent, The Iron Key: Poems, a meditation on the conditions and consequences of beauty. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry series, among other national journals and magazines

How I Teach: James Longenbach

James Longenbach is a member of the Department of Englis

Gold Nanoparticle Decorated Carbon Nanopipettes for Intracellular SERS

Single cell analysis is an increasingly important factor for understanding fundamental cellular functions at the molecular level. As a label-free technique capable of measuring multiple molecules simultaneously, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is an ideal candidate for miniaturization to the cellular level. Current SERS-active probe designs are limited by their size, fabrication difficulty, or background signal derived from functionalization. In this work, a protocol for batch fabrication of residue-free gold nanoparticle decorated carbon nanopipettes was developed. SERS-activity of the decorated nanopipettes was demonstrated on droplets of 1 mM glycine. The stability of the attached nanoparticles was confirmed in vivo by interrogation of living cells. Moreover, identification of several key factors related to particle growth will provide an avenue for future optimization of particle size and coverage.M.S., Materials Science and Engineering -- Drexel University, 201